ABSTRACT
With a strong sense of both the political pleasures and difficulties inherent in writing biographical narrative, it is scarcely surprising that for me one of the pleasures of post-modern theory is that it constructs the self as narrative and as both multiple and fractured. It is nothing other than a theoretical and practical relief to abandon that old taken-for-granted construction of the self as some fixed clear entity, which carried with it the always impossible, the methodological and theoretical commitment that to do autobiography, particularly by an academic woman, is to tell not merely ‘a’ but the ‘true’ account. It is not, of course, that the events didn’t happen, but that the self that I construct here tucked up in bed with flu, is the story I can tell now. Of course that narrative is crucially shaped by our childhoods, our parents, but also by the stories they told us about their own lives. Mine were school teachers reared as deferential conservatives in deepest Suffolk. But both came from families where the gender norms were disturbed. My mother was one of four children: the two boys went to the village school and were apprenticed as saddlers at 12. By contrast the two girls were encouraged by their mother to get scholarships to the girls’ grammar school. Both sisters went on to teacher training college so receiving eight years more full-time education than their
brothers. My father’s family farmed, not very effectively, as his mother was an invalid, so all three sons learnt all the domestic skills.
